The first and last of its kind, a Salt Lake City postal facility looks to grow

(Al Hartmann | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Some of the 1,600 data conversion operators "coders" work at Salt Lake City's Remote Encoding Center where U.S. Postal Service assign a barcode to handwritten and poorly printed addresses. What was once done at more than 50 centers around the nation now falls exclusively to 1,600 employees in Salt Lake City. Last year, they keyed in more than 2 billion codes. In 2014, each worker processed an average of 6,500 images each day, a number that is likely largely now due to a taxing deal with Amazon and a need for even greater efficiency to handle the volume assigned to a now-shuttered Wichita center.

(Al Hartmann | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Some of the 1,600 data conversion operators "coders" work at Salt Lake City's Remote Encoding Center where U.S. Postal Service assign a barcode to handwritten and poorly printed addresses. What was once done at more than 50 centers around the nation now falls exclusively to 1,600 employees in Salt Lake City. Last year, they keyed in more than 2 billion codes. In 2014, each worker processed an average of 6,500 images each day, a number that is likely largely now due to a taxing deal with Amazon and a need for even greater efficiency to handle the volume assigned to a now-shuttered Wichita center.

Encoding center » “Keyers” do the work that computers can’t, though the Postal Service’s optical character readers are catching up.

When the U.S. Postal Service's first remote encoding center, or REC, opened in Salt Lake City in 1994, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that it was expected to operate for 10 years.

Within three years, USPS had opened 55 RECs, where workers rapidly assigned bar codes to images of handwritten and shoddily printed addresses that stumped the Postal Service's character readers. Those workers processed 19 billion images in 1997. But there was never any doubting the future of postal encoding: It belonged to the machines.

After the 54th REC closure in Wichita, Kansas, in 2013, that location's manager, Dennis Lyons, issued a frank eulogy. RECs such as his, he said in a news release, "were created and deployed with the knowledge that new technology would eventually eliminate the need for them."

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Wichita's closure made Salt Lake City's REC not only the nation's first, but its last — the goal of the REC's leadership, ever aware of its mortality, when it opened in 1994.

Yet current employees say they don't expect it to shutter anytime soon. To the contrary, said manager Barbara Batin.

They're hiring.

Group leader Holli Apodaca, who started in 1997, once thought, "I hope I'll get my 20 years in," she said. "Now there's not a doubt in my mind."

The REC has changed since Apodaca signed on, lured from her customer service post at Packard Bell by competitive hourly pay and the promise of relief from impatient customers.

It then was housed in an annex by the airport, less than half the size of the current 77,000-square-foot office at 1275 S. 4800 West, and in those early years, the "keyers" had to physically move to terminals associated with a city.

Managers might have sounded like air-traffic controllers, keyers colliding between the rows of no-frills cubicles as they rushed to fill a need. Apodaca recalled with a laugh her confusion when she first heard the announcement: "If you're in Salt Lake, we need you to move to Albuquerque."

While the scene today might not strike a visitor as particularly high-tech — it looks and sounds like a never-ending, decades-old library computer lab — data now are pooled so a keyer at any one terminal can process images beamed in from around the nation.

Last year, the REC's more than 1,600 employees processed 2 billion images. Computers can read about 80 percent of packages and 99 percent of letters, but each Salt Lake City keyer still processes roughly 6,500 images per day.

Many worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, for almost a full month to meet the holiday demand, when volunteers were sought for 16-hour shifts.

It marked the second Christmas at the REC for Kearns' Miguel Vega, who began shortly before an especially overloaded 2014 holiday season. Vega said he is from Chile, where it is summer, and the time away from his family made him depressed.

But "I learned how to love this country," he said. "Once I [got] this job at USPS, I learned that I have a responsibility with the people."

Said Batin: "We're a single point of failure. If we go down, it affects the whole country."

Images of the mail appear on their screens with a series of prompts. Keyers type in the missing pieces of the address using rules and shortcuts that minimize keystrokes. When they're done with one piece of mail — which they often are in little more than a second — the next pops up.